The 25th GST council meeting held at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi has been ended. The new rates will come in power on the eve of Republic day, i.e January 25th, 2018.

But it is important to note that GST on 29 handicrafts items have been reduced to 0 per cent, which will increase competitiveness in worldwide markets and exports will increase which in turn boost economy. "The issue will be discussed then", Pant said coming out of the ongoing 25th GST Council meeting here.

The Union Budget, the last one during this tenure of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, will be presented on February 1.

Emphasising that the spirit of cooperative federalism would be encouraged and maintained, Jaitley said the memorandum jointly submitted by states and union territories would be given due weightage.

The panel also made a decision to divide between the Centre and state Rs 35,000 crore in Integrated Goods and Services Tax, or IGST, collections.

The all-powerful GST Council today revised rates on 29 items and 53 categories of services, and decided to make the process of filing GST returns simpler to ease compliance burden for small businesses.

This, coupled with subdued collections under the composition scheme, indicated that traders may be continuing to evade taxes or under-report revenues.

The council also decided that 3B returns filing will continue and suppliers can continue to load their invoices.

After implementation of the GST from July 1, the requirement of carrying e-way bill was postponed pending IT network readiness. This is indeed a populist move, including the decision on 40 handicraft items, said Abhishek A Rastogi, Partner, Khaitan & Co.